Free Astronomy Magazine July-August 2021

27 ASTRO PUBLISHING turning to other methods of inves- tigation, made possible by the re- markable advances made by our technology in recent years, by the copious discoveries of planetary sys- tems and by the imminent arrival of new ground- and space-based pow- erful telescopes. In the wake of this renewed enthusiasm, in 2018 NASA had begun to consider the search for technosignatures as an activity to be evaluated and supported. Not surprisingly, the agency had organ- ized the “NASA Technosignatures Workshop” meeting in September of that year, with the specific intent of defining the state-of-the-art in the field of technosignatures, the current limits of their research and the projects to be developed in the immediate future. One of the points of discussion at the meeting was the role that NASA might have played in advancing knowledge on technosig- natures, in partnership with other organizations. The interest shown by the agency on that occasion rep- resented a turning point in the gen- eral approach to non-radio tech- nosignatures, which thus became something more than a bizarre field of research on the edge of sci-fi. Two years later, in August 2020, NASA sponsored a second workshop on the topic, named “TechnoClimes 2020” and organized by the Blue Marble Space Institute of Science. The purpose of this second meeting among the leading experts in the sector was to produce a research agenda for technosignatures, eval- uating projects and missions that could offer new opportunities, re- gardless of the current limits of available resources. For the first time, the efforts of different initia- tives were combined, offering an overview of current and near-future capabilities in undertaking a sys- tematic search for technosignatures. The instruments that astrobiologists will have at their disposal in a few years will allow them to detect in space technosignatures with inten- sities comparable to those of terres- trial ones, up to distances of tens or hundreds of light-years. Currently, with the astronomical infrastruc- tures at our disposal, we can only detect technosignatures much more intense than ours, probably pro- duced by superior technologies. According to one of the conclusions emerged from TechnoClimes 2020, it is unlikely that civilizations with a relatively low level of technological development (more or less like ours) could come into contact with each other, because this would require transmission or reception capacity